Progressive critiques of India’s recent development prospects are often marked by schizophrenic worldviews – between what is and what ought to be.

Mira Kamdar’s recent piece in the World Policy Journalillustrates this well. By Ms. Kamdar’s account Indians are heading down an inevitable path to doomsday. Malthusian population pressures, resource scarcity, global warming, environmental degradation, industrial capitalism, and political corruption have combined with an inherently fractured society that is likely to erupt in caste, religious, and class warfare, terrorism, and self-destruction. Mix in the recent US-India civilian-Nuclear deal and the presence of unstable neighbors – Pakistan, Bangladesh – along with an aggressive China, and Ms. Kamdar offers up all the ingredients for a nuclear holocaust. The only uncertainty we are left with is: which doomsday will India break into first — internal implosion or external explosion?

Ilian Mihov, Professor of Economics at INSEAD, holds forth on the lessons of the collapse of the ‘golden age’ of the late 1920s. What is the biggest lesson from the Great Depression? In my view, it is that monetary policy and the financial sector play a crucial role in economic development. Let me put it […]